


Aftermath

by Ruusverd



Series: Echoes of the Fall AU [25]
Category: Echoes of the Fall - Adrian Tchaikovsky, Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Bronze Age AU, Gen, shapeshifter AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:53:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,876
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26165188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ruusverd/pseuds/Ruusverd
Summary: Geralt and Yen share a headache. Yennefer gets caught up on what happened after Geralt Stepped. They start making plans for the near future.
Series: Echoes of the Fall AU [25]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1863010
Comments: 8
Kudos: 12





	Aftermath

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry about the lateness, I posted this this morning, but my house was super-chaotic and I was so distracted I forgot to add it to the series. *facepalm*

Yennefer woke up with an unhappy hiss. Her head was pounding fit to burst and she felt fragile, like if she moved too quickly she would fly apart into pieces. Her lidless eyes slowly focused and she saw she was curled up on Geralt’s side, and both of them were resting on a stretcher. The rest of their tribe and Geralt’s brothers were setting up camp. The noise that had woken her was a dropped cooking pot clanking against a rock. With great reluctance she slithered down from her warm coil in Geralt’s fur and scented the air for Ciri, hissing in protest when someone almost stepped on her.

“Sorry! Didn’t know you were awake!” Lem crouched down and peered at her. “Feeling peaky still? Ciri’s just now woken up enough to talk straight.” She grinned, “A lot of old memories, walking along for hours watching her sleep on someone’s back. I’m glad you’re awake, it’s creepy with a Snake trying to tell if you were dead. But Regis said you weren’t, and he ought to know.”

Yennefer Stepped and reached up to adjust the scarf wrapped around her head, which had been knocked askew. “Ciri’s all right then?” she asked, trying to remember clearly what had happened. The last thing she remembered was feeling Geralt’s pain through the bond and Stepping to the serpent, convinced they were both about to die. Apparently they had survived, which was a nice surprise.

“Ciri’s fine, as far as we can tell.” Lem filled Yennefer in on what had happened after Geralt Stepped to the Champion, or at least the parts she knew. She recounted her battle against Vilgefortz with particular glee, which Yen tried not to find disturbing. She would never get used to the Plains people’s lack of reverence for priests, but in this case she was grateful for it. Lem finished with a lurid description of Emhyr losing his souls and being stabbed by Vilgefortz, who was in turn killed by the Kasra's soldiers.

“The river men carried his Kasra-ness off south with them when the Wolves marched them away. They said it looked like he’d live, but what use a hollow Kasra’s supposed to be I don’t know. The Hyena isn’t scared of anything and he still gave me the shivers. Cahir’s Caiman is still too scared come out, he says.”

“He won’t be hollow once they get back,” Ciri said. She was sitting on a blanket and had that slightly disoriented look of someone who’s slept too long at the wrong time of day. “The gods said he’d get his souls back as long as he stays in his own city.”

Out of long habit, Yennefer’s mind immediately started to analyze the implications of Emhyr’s situation for the Sun River Nation. Emhyr would have to be very clever and very lucky to keep either his life or his throne after a disaster of this scale. She started calculating the odds of Emhyr managing to stay in power, and wondering which of the River Lords would succeed the childless Kasra if he were deposed, then gave it up as a useless line of thought. That was a problem for her brothers and sisters in Atahlan to solve, and the political balance of the river might have changed entirely since she’d left in any case.

_Even if he manages to s_ _urvive this_ _,_ she thought, _he'll never be secure in his position again. He’ll spend the rest_ _of his r_ _eign balanced on a knife’s edge. The slightest hint of failure, the faintest rumor of_ _weakness_ _or instability_ _w_ _ill_ _be enough to topple him._ _He certainly_ _won't be able to risk any unpopular wars or_ _unexplained expeditions to bring back young foreign girls_ _._ The thought gave her some satisfaction. No matter what happened to Emhyr, her family was safe from him.

Yennefer sat next to Ciri on the blanket and closed her eyes against the late afternoon sun, hoping it would ease her headache. It was a slim hope. She thought most of the headache was actually Geralt's which probably meant nothing she did would affect it. The residual pain from the bond was lasting longer than it had when Geralt almost died from a Dragon’s bite, but that incident had only injured his body. This injury had directly affected his souls, and she supposed that made a difference. It was their souls that were bound together, after all.

“Are the Wolves going to take the Crocodiles all the way south?” Ciri asked.

“Not all the way to Atahlan,” Lem told her. Yennefer cracked one eyelid open to see the Hyena woman sit on the ground on Ciri's other side and lean back on her elbows, legs stretched out in front of her. “Sounded like they just planned on taking the river men and their Kasra back to their boats and sending them on their way from there. A lot of the Wolves said it would be simpler and safer to just toss the whole warband in the bog, but the priests said they didn’t want Crocodile ghosts floating around in the swamp, so off they went.” She shook her head, “That swamp is already bursting with ghosts, anyone could tell that. Don’t know what difference a couple of Crocodiles would make.”

“What are you doing sitting down, Laughing Girl?” Lambert called from the other side of the camp. “There’s still work to be done!”

“Everybody knows setting up camp is men’s work!” Lem called back, crossing one ankle across the other deliberately. “Milva, come sit down! You’re giving the men ideas above their station!”

Ciri giggled, and Yennefer rolled her eyes as Lem and Lambert started hurling good-natured insults at each other. Even after so many years away from her own people, Lem still liked to declare that any chore she didn’t want to do was ‘men’s work.’ Yennefer knew Lem did it mostly just to start arguments for the sake of it. After all, a tribe with no real hearth-keepers meant everyone had to take turns doing the more domestic tasks, and the menfolk of their group had quickly disabused her of any genuine belief that she was exempt from such chores due to her gender.

Their shouting woke Geralt. Yennefer heard him shifting around and felt a spike in her headache. “Stop shouting,” she told them firmly. “My head is going to burst like an overripe melon.”

“Are you all right?” Ciri asked her worriedly.

Yennefer smiled, though she suspected it might look more like a grimace. “I’ll be fine, but if the echo of Geralt’s headache is this bad I hate to think what _his_ head feels like.”

Geralt got up and slunk away from the stretcher with his head lowered and his tail pressed against his legs. He trampled across Lem and lay down gingerly with his head in Ciri’s lap and the rest of him draped over Yen’s legs, settling with a drawn-out grumbling noise of complaint.

Ciri frowned at the white wolf resting with his head in her lap. "Is he all right? Why hasn't he Stepped back?" she asked.

Eskel shrugged, looking up from his work. "He's just not ready to I suppose. The first time this happened he wasn’t right in the head for a weeks, but he recovered eventually. I imagine he'll either get better faster because the Champion's gone entirely, or slower because it's the second time he's been injured this way. I guess we'll find out which."

"He isn't... like Plotka, is he?" Ciri asked, hands moving anxiously over the fur on Geralt’s face and neck.

“No,” Yennefer said, “I’d know.” She wasn't sure if the loss of his human self would be enough kill her or if it would require physical death of the wolf left behind, but surely she would be able to tell if his mind had left them entirely. She wished the bond would tell her something useful about Geralt’s mental state instead of only sharing his pain.

"He might have been," Regis said solemnly. "If your uncles hadn't gone to the Godsland to retrieve him, he might not have found his way out."

"What if he doesn’t ever Step back? How long can he stay a wolf?"

"Depends," Lambert said. "The party of Swift Backs I came with stayed Stepped for days at a time to get here. A couple of us were sluggish about coming back but we didn't lose anyone. But someone with an injured mind could—ow," he complained when Eskel punched him in the arm to shut him up.

"He isn’t like Plotka," Yennefer insisted, “I would _know.”_

"See? Nothing to worry about. If Yennefer thinks we're in danger of losing him I'll put a rope around his neck and drag him back to his human shape," Eskel promised.

“That’s comforting. If all else fails we’ll strangle him,” Cahir snorted from where he was trying to coax a fire to life. His expression looked tight and Yennefer remembered Lem had told her his soul was still buried deep. She hoped it came out of hiding soon; the Caiman spent too much of his time unable to Step due to the cold northern climate as it was. Yennefer could shrink her serpent form and curl up by the fire or wind herself around Geralt to stay warm, but that wasn’t practical for a reptile as large as Cahir's.

“We’re not going to _strangle_ him,” Lambert protested, “just knock him out of his Stepped shape.”

“We didn’t go all the way to the Godsland and drag his sorry tail back just to let him get lost in his own head,” Coen added.

"Does that mean you’re going to stay with us for a little while?" Ciri asked Eskel hopefully, heading off the brewing argument.

Eskel and the others exchanged glances. "You’re going to need us for a long time, even after his head’s right again," he said. "A young Wolf needs more than just one of her own people around to teach her, and Geralt probably won’t be teaching anything for a while.”

“Won’t your tribes get mad, if you stay away too long?”

“Let them,” Lambert said flatly. “It was one thing when Geralt was himself and you hadn’t come into your wolf’s soul yet. Then, it was Geralt’s own choice if he wanted to stay apart. This is different. You and Geralt need us now more than our tribes do.” Coen and Eskel nodded agreement.

“Wolves aren’t supposed to be alone,” Eskel added. “Five’s a small pack, but not too small.”

Ciri beamed at being included in the count, and Yennefer smiled at her before closing her eyes again, gently stoking Geralt’s back and side where he lay across her lap. Geralt made another grumbled whining noise and wriggled around to a more comfortable position, clearly wanting everyone to stop talking and let him sleep. He was really too heavy in either form to lay on top of her and it wouldn’t be long before his weight made her legs go numb. But for the moment she enjoyed having him sprawled across her lap, a solid reminder that even if it took him a while to fully recover himself, he was still with them.


End file.
